Aliens: Johannes The Kepler Mission

Finding life on another planet has been talked about for a long time. It can be an exciting subject because there are many possibilities. There are many planets that are yet to be discovered. There are many different kinds of planets out there as well that come in different varieties. For example some planets have atmosphere while others have no atmosphere to speak of, and some planets have water while some don’t. The fact that not all planets are the same is well known. What is not known is if there really is one or more planets with any form of life on them. The Kepler mission’s spacecraft, named after Johannes Kepler, was launched up into space by a rocket in 2009 and its purpose is to try to find these planets that may habitable.
Johannes …show more content…
This means that they are looking for habitable planets. These planets need to meet certain specifications in order to be considered as such. In order to be habitable for human beings the planets have to be a certain distance from their stars and have liquid water. The size of these planets is important as well. They are specifically looking for planets that are one half the size of Earth to twice the size of Earth. NASA’s website lists their objectives to be finding the amount of terrestrial and larger planets that are in or close to the habitable zone of a variety of stars, figure out the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets, estimate how many planets are contained in multiple-star systems, find the variety of orbit sizes and planet reflectivity, sizes, masses and densities of short-period giant planets, find additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques, and find the properties of those starts that have planetary systems. In order to accomplish this mission they need to have good methods, design, and …show more content…
The photometer has multiple camera sensors that are useful in detecting planets that are passing in front of their stars. It is travelling space orbiting the sun once every 371 days. The photometer is monitoring a specific wedge-shaped part of space. Kepler is looking at a large area of the sky that is in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra. They picked this area because it is viewable at all times, it has a lot of stars condensed in that specific area, and it is the perfect size for the spacecraft and photometer. The Kepler telescope is sensing the brightness of more than 150,000 stars at all times. In order to keep constant watch over these stars they the images can’t be interrupted. The area within the two constellations is important for that because it is so far north of Earth’s orbit that the sun will not get into the images and they can determine the correct brightness of the stars they are looking for. They are looking at the brightness of these stars because it indicates that there may be planets surrounding them or not. If the brightness is interrupted by a dark spot, or a dip, then they are able to tell that it might very well be a planet that is orbiting that particular star. They don’t consider a dip to be a planet on the first sighting though. In order for a dip to be a

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